INDIVIDUALISM IN THE PRESS.
THE Times had a good article the other day about the want of individualism manifest in the present House of Commons. Everybody was very sensible, very faithful, very much in the right, as a rule, and much inclined to be a bore. The writer grew quite agreeably cross about it, seemed once or twice as if he were going to be natural, and once, as his readers thought, was only restrained by a severe sense of political duty from swearing audibly. It must have been part of his duty to listen to the debates, and if Sterne's Recording Angel had to listen too, he would have let him off very easily, even if his self-restraint had not been so complete. If he had sworn in the House, we are quite sure that even the tear would have been considered needless, the Angel succumbing to the pleasure of momentary relief. There never was in the world a bore equal to the present House of Commons, unless it be the Press which attempts to record its debates, and we are bound to say succeeds very badly in the attempt. " What in the world," we feel tempted to cry every morning, " has come to the daily papers ?" They are duller than the orators, who are as dull as ditch-water. One can account for the dullness of the House, which is full to repletion of local magnates, and has Ireland for sole topic, and is oppressed by a sense that it is of no use for anybody to say anything, for if the saying is on the side of Government, it is superfluous ; and if it is hostile to Govern- ment, Mr. Glyn will settle the speaker without allowing the Pre- mier to give himself the trouble of a reply. There are theories of deterioration, of dictatorship, of the awkwardness incidental to democracy while in the hobbydehoy stage, with growing pains and lubberly ways, and a great fear of talkative women, any one of which will account for the stupidity of the Parliament of 1868, —a stupidity so dense and so utter that an Irish member's blunder is a relief, a question by Sir George Jenkinson a source of laughter, and a speech from Mr. Bernal Osborne an intellectual luxury. One wonders sometimes what the House would do if it got a genuine humourist in it, if Edinburgh, for instance, in a fit of remorseful intellect—it has brains, Edinburgh, though it does not show them at elections—were to send up Dr. John Brown, or any- body else with capacity for a red-hot epigram. But the condition of the House does not account for the condition of the Press. The papers are not managed by committee. The local magnates have not got hold of them, or, at all events, are not writing their leaders. They need not talk about Ireland unless they like, and household suffrage is not more oppressive to the editors than the ten-pound suffrage was. The papers may be interesting, if Mem- bers mayn't, and on the whole, fairly read, as we read -them, with. that sort of tolerance men with the newspaper passion on them usually have, they are duller than the members them- selves, which, considering that journalists must have brains to live and that members need not have, seems a wilful oppression on the public. The journalists will say it is all the fault of the statesmen, that they must have pabulum, that there is nothing going on, that even Napoleon has turned himself into a demure constitutional king, that Prim never was a lively subject, and that it is impossible to be even satirical on President Grant's economic eillinesses ; and that is all true, but it does not account for the dreadful sameness which has recently beset everybody, for the total absence of even difference of opinion. Three-fourths of the papers talk diluted Gladstone, and the remaining fourth Lord John Manners, without the dilution, which in his case might be beneficial. In spite of proverbs, milk-and- water, especially if well iced, is a much more palatable draught than milk. The last trace of individualism, bad or good, seems to have vanished, or survives only in the touch of acid which some- body on the Pall Mall Gazette contrives to put into the milk, making thereby a sort of whey, and the papers are become as tiresome as sermons. One has to read the provincial leaders to be sure that such a thing as an independent opinion exists in the United Kingdom, while for a touch of humour we must cross the Channel, or for a bit of eloquence listen to some Nationalist paper denounc- ing the Coercion Bill. It is wind, most of it, that those Irishmen give us ; but it does rush, does suggest what a tornado might be, and the stuff in the London papers suggests nothing but the bellows.
What is the matter with us all ? A good deal has been said and more might be said about the absurd conditions under which metropolitan journalism is now working, the superstitions about leaders which seem to oppress it, the regime of advertisements, the impossible pecuniary requirements,—the public asking for a penny what it cannot have for less than five farthings, yet refusing to pay broken money,—and some accidental circumstances into which we do not care to enter ; but we are not sure that the savage writer in the Britannia—magazine which has reached its third number of a new series, but which we do not remember in our culpable ignorance ever to have seen before—has not hit the true blot. The papers have become, in the gradual transition of journalism from a slightly disreputable, or at all events Bohemian occupation, into a powerful profession, too like departments of the Government and of the Opposition, have loaded themselves with responsibilities and reticences, and all manner of literary fetters
which do not belong to them at all. He writes ill-temperedly, and talks trash about the servility of men who, if servile at all, are servile to their own chiefs alone,—a servility which is wonder- fully like loyalty in result, and very often in motive ; and though we agree heartily with his principle, he exaggerates to absurdity his strictures on the offence of writing to order, the truth being that any editor with a head who wanted anything written to order would select a man to write it who more or less coincided honestly with his view ; but there is a disagreeable substratum of truth about this ferocious paragraph : " We talk of the liberty of the Press now-a-days, but the liberty of the Press is limited to the privilege of abusing antagonists. To those immediately concerned, this much-boasted liberty is sheer and absolute servitude. The party journalist is at every turn weighted with the traditions of the past and the policy of the present, which belong to the soi-distant statesmen whom he re- presents in print. He will receive the strictest directions from his editor to take his cue in all matters, great or small, from the leader of the party, nay, that same leader will condescend to de- spatch missives from Grosvenor Gate to Fleet Street, or from Carlton House Terrace to a certain square adjacent to Ludgate Hill, conveying full intelligence as to the subject of which the leader-writer is to treat, and the views on those subjects which it is held desirable he should express. From the line of action thus marked out for him, our journalist will not be permitted to stir one inch ; and if in a moment of impulsively independent originality he ventures to interpolate a single bit of sentiment of his own, that sentiment will be remorselessly eliminated by a discreet editor, who, if he has been acting up to his duty, corrects the article of his contributor, fresh from the rumours of lobbies, and newly primed with all the gossip of clubs. So much for the boasted liberty of the Press as regards the writer himself. So much for the spontaneity of party journalism. The whole insti- tution is about as free or natural as the machinery of a manufac- tory is free or natural, and the party journalist works neither more nor less mechanically than the piston or the screw." Journalists have, in fact, become powerful, without becoming so individualized to the world that they are compelled also to be themselves. They have become powerful, too, in a way which makes them feel like Ministers, and burdens them with all those reticences which are the intellectual curse of Ministers who have to exercise power through Parliamentary forms, those habits of producing not the true argument but the popular argument which begin.to mark the House of Commons, and which made, to take one example only, the debate in the Lords on the Coercion Bill so much more readable, because so much more honest, than the debate in the Commons. Official information, too, has become indefinitely more valuable. We frankly confess we do not know why this is, why newspapers have ceased so much to depend on themselves for the collection of facts ; but we believe that it is due partly to greater interest in the proceedings of the Government as compared with the proceedings of the public—Government having acquired a real leadership—partly to the increased power of journalism, which tempts the leaders on both sides to insist on stricter discipline, and partly to the accidents of the hour, but the fact remains. The papers are as decorous, as detailed, and as dull as the politicians. A leader beginning with Brougham's famous sentence, " The Queen has done it all," would be rejected with horror, a hint that a Cabinet is divided is regarded as treason, and as for an individual or " crotchetty " or popular view of any given topic, say, for example, the Press Restriction Law, upon which there is some fierce difference of opinion, it can barely get itself uttered in an undertone of querulous- ness. Ideas, popular and otherwise, get expressed in the weekly journals, but in the daily papers, that is, in the real Press as popularly understood, they have no snore chance than they have in the House of Commons. We are not taking the smallest credit to ourselves for the difference, which results in a great degree from the absence of temptation. The Saturday Review, the Spectator, the Examiner, and the like, do not want news, do not care for what are called "close relations," and are aware that their constituencies will pretty much let them say what they like, provided they say it well. But we do lament, as a distinct, an in- creasing, and a serious evil, the want of "birr" and "go" and force, of individualism and intellectual eccentricity, in the Metropolitan Press. It is not only a bore to have everybody saying the same things, it is an evil ; for the apparent unanimity is not real, and covers up and intensifies popular dislikes which, so suppressed, burst out in the end like intellectual nitro-glycerine. We disagree with the Daily News upon education about as heartily as it is possible for two papers to disagree, but it was a positive relief to see it break
that chorus of eulogy—as we think of just eulogy—which fol- lowed the production of the Government Bill, and express all by itself the feeling of the inevitable dissidents. We do not read the Morning Advertiser, and never met a human being who did ; but we shall have to read it if it " pitches into" its own side, apropos of nuns, in the fashion of a recent leader. The leader is very ridiculous, but scores of thousands of people think just that non- sense, and it breaks the dreary monotony of assent and opposition which just now reduces the London Press to a position suggesting Douglas Jerrold's definition of equality, "frogs under a flagstone."
Previous page
